Daniel Craig recently wrapped up his tenure with the James Bond franchise in wildly satisfying fashion. Over the course of his five movies in the role of 007 – Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre, and No Time to Die – Craig’s Bond faced some of the series’ most memorable villains.
From the torturous Le Chiffre to the megalomaniacal Safin to the Thanos-sized big bad himself, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Craig’s Bond movies featured some fantastic villains. But for every great villain, there was a one-dimensional baddie with a poorly conceived plan.
Dominic Greene
In theory, the main Quantum of Solace villain, Dominic Greene, is a classic Bond baddie. He’s a dangerously narrow-minded tycoon obsessed with power. But he’s just a generic unscrupulous billionaire. The idea was to offer a modern-day take on a traditional Bond villain, but the end product is wholly uninspired.
The biggest problem with Quantum of Solace is that it plays more like a straightforward action thriller than a Bond movie, and the villain is a major symptom of that. Still, Greene has one of the darkest Bond villain death scenes as 007 leaves him stranded in the desert with nothing to drink but a can of oil.
Mr. White
Mr. White is a recurring villain throughout the Craig movies. He’s introduced in Casino Royale as a liaison for an unidentified criminal organization. In Quantum of Solace, this turns out to be “Quantum,” and in Spectre, Quantum turns out to be a subsidiary of Spectre.
He’s more interesting for his significance to the plot as opposed to the character himself. Mr. White is pretty one-dimensional, but he introduced Spectre – and, by extension, Blofeld – into the Craig timeline. Plus, he’s the negligent, cold-hearted father responsible for Madeleine Swann’s traumatic childhood.
Raoul Silva
Javier Bardem gives a haunting performance as Raoul Silva, the main villain in Skyfall. Bardem brings the same unsettling edge to Silva that he brought to his Oscar-winning performance as a different cold-blooded villain: hitman Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ neo-western masterpiece No Country for Old Men.
Unfortunately, despite Bardem’s incredible performance, the Silva character is let down by his needlessly complicated plan. All he wants to do is kill M, but his plan takes him all over the world just to get him in a room with M to shoot her. He gets himself locked in the highest-security prison in Britain just so he could escape.
Lyutsifer Safin
Lyutsifer Safin, the villain that Craig’s Bond faced in his fifth and final adventure No Time to Die, is a classic 007 villain. For all the changes it made to the Bond formula, No Time to Die provided a welcome return to traditional megalomaniacs with ludicrous, apocalyptic designs and an awesome secret lair that Bond infiltrates in the finale.
Since a lot of Bond villain actors ham it up in an attempt to stand out, it was refreshing to see Rami Malek’s subversively understated turn as Safin. The only problem with the character is that he lacks a clear motivation. There are suggestions that Mr. White killed his family, he’s in love with Madeleine, and he has a “god complex,” but that doesn’t all add up to round him out as a sympathetic or even fully developed character.
Ernst Stavro Blofeld
Christoph Waltz’s villainous overlord in Spectre is introduced as “Franz Oberhauser,” but that alias was about as convincing as Benedict Cumberbatch’s “John Harrison” in Star Trek Into Darkness. Just as John Harrison turned out to be Khan like everybody expected, Franz Oberhauser turned out to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld like everybody expected.
Fake-out aside, the Craig movies offered a pretty compelling incarnation of Blofeld. Nobody can replace Donald Pleasance as the quintessential Blofeld, but Waltz had a fantastic take on the character.
Mr. Hinx
Henchmen are a proud tradition of the Bond franchise, but that tradition fell by the wayside when the gritty realism of Casino Royale eschewed a bunch of the series’ outdated tropes. As a result, the Craig movies only had one true henchman character – Spectre’s top assassin, Mr. Hinx – but thanks to Dave Bautista’s fierce performance, Mr. Hinx ranks among the franchise’s best.
Since the role of Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy made him a star as a likable antihero, it was interesting to see the former wrestler let loose as a full-blown bad guy. Hinx isn’t quite as memorable as Richard Kiel’s Jaws, but his brutality is on par with Robert Shaw’s Red Grant and Benicio del Toro’s Dario.
Le Chiffre
Since the whole movie revolves around a high-stakes poker game, the main villain in Casino Royale doesn’t have secret lairs and legions of goons on his side. The terror of Le Chiffre relied entirely on Mads Mikkelsen’s performance, and he played him as one of the most genuinely menacing Bond villains to date. He wouldn’t be out of place in a psychological horror movie.
Mikkelsen brought the same haunting sadistic edge to Le Chiffre that he would later bring to Hannibal Lecter. His performance as Le Chiffre as a cold-blooded maniac was perfectly matched to the gritty, semi-realistic tone of the movie. In one particularly shocking sequence, he tortures a naked Bond in a seatless chair.